130,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock πŸ‡³πŸ‡Ώ 

McDonagh Plays: 1

The Beauty Queen of Leenane; A Skull in Connemara; The Lonesome West
4.24 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 3,095 ratings, 128 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
McDonagh Plays: 1 collects three gripping plays by Martin McDonagh known for their sharp wit and dark exploration of human relationships. The Beauty Queen of Leenane delves into mistrust and resentment in a rural Irish setting. A Skull in Connemara delivers a mix of macabre humour and raw emotion, while The Lonesome West blends manic energy and physical violence, creating a theatrically thrilling experience.
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$5199
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 4-6 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This collection is ideal for readers interested in contemporary theatre, dark comedy, and Irish cultural narratives. Theatre practitioners and fans of intense, character-driven drama will find this volume compelling.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

One of the most exciting young dramatists to emerge in Britain during the 1990s. His three most important plays in one volume

One of the most exciting young dramatists to emerge in Britain during the 1990s. His three most important plays in one volume

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Martin McDonagh's plays have been produced in Galway, Dublin, London, and New York. They have created excitement and have won numerous awards. In individual editions, the plays have been among Methuen's most popular sellers.

Martin McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy is hailed as "one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre" (Irish Times).

This volume contains:

The Beauty Queen of Leenane - "McDonagh's writing is pitiless but compassionate: he casts a cold, hard, but understanding eye on relationships made of mistrust, hesitation, resentment and malevolence" (Sunday Times).

A Skull in Connemara - "Here, McDonagh's gift is at its most naked and infectious... it leaves you giddy with gruesome exhilaration" (Financial Times).

The Lonesome West - "The play combines manic energy and physical violence in a way that is both hilarious and viscerally exciting" (Daily Telegraph).

"A star is born, bright and blazing, confident, individual and shockingly accomplished" (Sunday Times).

Series: Contemporary Dramatists

View all
  • Kane: Complete Plays
    When Blasted was first produced at the Royal Court in 1995, it was hailed jointly as a masterpiece and a "disgusting piece of filth" (Daily Mail). Subsequently, that play, and the others that followed, have been produced all over the world. This anthology includes Kane's never-before-published Channel 4 screenplay, Skin.
    Paperback
    $5199
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Fo Plays: 1
    Fo Plays: 1 by Dario Fo is a captivating collection that showcases the playwright's unique style and poignant commentary on societal issues. Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays. It offers a rich exploration of traditional narratives, revealing their enduring relevance. The Accidental Death of an Anarchist tackles the controversial incident involving the...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • McDonagh Plays: 1
    Martin McDonagh's plays have been produced in Galway, Dublin, London, and New York. They have created excitement and have won numerous awards. In individual editions, the plays have been among Methuen's most popular sellers. Martin McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy is hailed as "one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre" (Irish Times). This volume contains: The Beauty Queen...
    Paperback
    $5199
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Alistair McDowall Plays 2
    ALISTAIR MCDOWALL uses language with virtuosity. He folds it, unfolds it, dirties it, mishandles it, and in doing so, he celebrates it. It is as a poet that he uses writing to honour its promises: to excite the imagination, to stimulate play, to provoke staging and to elevate the theatre. Le Monde McDowall’s plays are portals to the extraordinary. Guardian...
    Paperback
    $4399
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Lucy Prebble Plays 1
    Lucy Prebble is one of Britain's foremost writers for the stage and screen. This eagerly anticipated play collection brings together her landmark plays for the first time, showcasing her work from 2003 to 2019. Beginning with her George Devine Award-winning play The Sugar Syndrome, it continues through her explosive look at the biggest financial scandal in history, concluding with her...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Mamet Plays: 3
    "The finest American playwright of his generation" (Sunday Times) Glen Garry Glen Ross (also made into a film starring Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino) is "his superb play about real estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition" (New Society). In Prairie du Chien, a railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Barnes Plays: 1
    A selection of plays by one of the most original and biting comic writers working in Britain (The Times). The Ruling Class is a scorching and savage tragedy, yet its jokes are innumerable... they throw wide open the windows of your mind, they enlarge your field of vision and they blow away the accumulated dust of ages (Sunday Times). Leonardo's...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Churchill Plays: 1
    In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapositions" (Plays and Players). Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century" (Tribune). Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Churchill Plays: 2
    Churchill Plays: 2 includes four groundbreaking plays by Caryl Churchill, each offering a unique and compelling theatrical experience. Softcops transforms the philosophy of Foucault into a music-hall performance and Victorian freakshow. As noted by the Times Literary Supplement, "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun." Top Girls gathers five remarkable and not-so-remarkable women from history for a dinner...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • David Ireland Plays 1
    'Playwright David Ireland challenges people to draw lines between what they find funny and what they find outrageous' (Sydney Morning Herald). This first collection of plays by David Ireland brings together three of his most successful hits that have enjoyed numerous productions around the world, alongside two previously unpublished plays: Half a Glass of Water: 'The dialogue is brutal and...
    Paperback
    $4999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Isley Lynn Plays 1
    The first collection of plays from Olivier-nominated playwright Isley Lynn, whose award-winning work uplifts their deeply human characters through stories that are unexpected, radically intimate, and profoundly theatrical. Lean (2013): "It's not just powerful but it's incandescent. There is a profound intensity... that truly keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way through. Sensitively written... Exemplary theatre...
    Paperback
    $9400
    Available
    Ships in 2-3 weeks
  • Levy Plays: 1
    ____________________ THE FIRST COLLECTION OF PLAYS BY ONE OF BRITAIN'S LEADING WRITERS ____________________ This stunning collection of plays from the talented Deborah Levy includes Pax; Clam; The B File; Pushing the Prince into Denmark; Honey, Baby; and Macbeth: False Memories. '[Levy] does not deal with realism, she does not deal with magic realism, rather she draws out a new territory,...
    Paperback
    $5199
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Praised as "one of the great events of contemporary Irish theatre" (Irish Times), McDonagh's writing is described as "pitiless but compassionate" (Sunday Times) with a talent that "leaves you giddy with gruesome exhilaration" (Financial Times). The plays are noted for their hilarious yet viscerally exciting energy (Daily Telegraph) and hailed as a star-making display of originality and accomplishment (Sunday Times).

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780413713506

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 03 June 1999

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Methuen Drama

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 14.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 260g

Pages: 224

About the Author

Martin McDonagh is a London-born Irish playwright whose first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award. It also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Since then McDonagh has gone on to write multiple smash-hit shows and films and win multiple awards including an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2005), an Oscar nomination, a British Independent Film Award for best screenplay, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script and a BAFTA for best original screenplay, all for In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, 2008), and a Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play for The Pillowman (won 2004).

Also by Martin McDonagh

View all
  • The Lieutenant of Inishmore
    Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall. (Pause.) He won't be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of a brain gone. Who knocked Wee Thomas over on the lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident?...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Lieutenant of Inishmore
    'There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore... Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point... a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century' Guardian 'A brave satire... Swiftianly savage and parodic... with explicit brutal action and...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Beauty Queen Of Leenane
    The Beauty Queen of Leenane was first presented as a Druid Theatre/Royal Court Theatre co-production in January 1996. Set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag, her manipulative ageing mother. The mother's interference in Maureen's first...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Cripple of Inishmaan
    In 1934, the people of Inishmaan learn that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighbouring island to film his documentary Man of Aran. No one is more excited than Billy, an unloved and crippled boy whose chief occupation has been gazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. For Billy is...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Hangmen
    I'm just as good as bloody Pierrepoint. In his small pub in Oldham, Harry is something of a local celebrity. But what's the second-best hangman in England to do on the day they've abolished hanging? Amongst the cub reporters and sycophantic pub regulars, dying to hear Harry's reaction to the news, a peculiar stranger lurks, with a very different motive...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Pillowman
    A man, a writer of short stories, is held in police custody in a totalitarian state. He doesn't know why he is being held but assumes it must be something to do with his writing. Many of his stories involve children being killed and tortured. His brother, who has learning difficulties, is also being held. As the play unfolds, the...
    Paperback
    $3299
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Modern Drama: Plays of the '80s and '90s
    With an introduction by Graham Whybrow, literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, this anthology collects the defining plays of the 1980s and 1990s in one volume. Top Girls: 'The best British play ever from a woman dramatist' (The Guardian) Hysteria: 'One of the most brilliantly original and entertaining new plays I have seen in years' (The Sunday Times) Blasted:...
    Paperback
    Sold Out

More from Arts & Culture

View all
  • Dylan's Pick
    Bold Types
    A tribute to 32 truly independent bookshops throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, from north of Auckland down to Dunedin, and coast to coast. Jane Ussher's photographs show every bookstore in its unique nature - including behind the counter, smoko rooms, the mess which tells the hardworking story behind the joy of matching books with customers. Jemma Moreira's careful editing has crafted...
    Hardback
    $5999
    Elsewhere:
    $7000
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • New Release
    I’ll Believe in Anything
    From Jacob Tierney, the creator ofΒ Heated Rivalry, in partnership with Brendan Brady and AccentΒ Aigu, comesΒ I’llΒ Believe in Anything, an official and complete collection of annotated scripts for the biggest cultural sensation of the year, with all new exclusive behind-the-scenes content.Based on Rachel Reid’s blockbuster Game Changers book series,Β Heated RivalryΒ premiered on Crave and HBO in late 2025 andΒ immediatelyΒ took the world by storm.Β I’ll...
    Hardback
    $5499
    Elsewhere:
    $6000
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • On Sale
    16% off
    New Release
    Home Again
    Join rock-legend, former Shihad frontman and lead singer of The Adults, Jon Toogood in this unflinching and no-holds-barred memoirΒ Home Again.This is more than a rock story.Β Toogood looks back on a 37-year career that helped define New Zealand rock music, and the personal cost that came with it.Β From a music-obsessed childhood in Wellington to the deafening roar of international stages, this...
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • On Sale
    20% off
    The Odyssey
    Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travellers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative....
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $3599
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • On Sale
    21% off
    The Iliad
    When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017β€”revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)β€”critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an...
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $2600
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Disney Moana: The Official Cookbook
    Embark on a culinary adventure with Moana of Motunui with Pacific recipes inspired by Moana and Moana 2! After a long day of sailing to see how far you’ll go or keeping the demigod Maui out of trouble with Te Fiti, catch a break with the delicious dishes in Moana: The Official Cookbook! Featuring more than 50 recipes spanning the...
    Hardback
    $4499
    Elsewhere:
    $5299
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • New Release
    A Life in Lyrics
    Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest showmen of the twentieth century. With his unparalleled voice and searing on-stage energy, he was a great pretender, a killer queen and a champion of the world. But behind the glamour lived a musician and lyricist talented beyond measure, and the creative force behind one of the most culturally significant and musically diverse...
    Hardback
    $5000
    Elsewhere:
    $6500
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Birdlands Birdlands
    New Release
    Birdlands
    A rare, intimate journey into the wild islands where Aotearoa's birds live beyond the reach of most human lives. In the most remote outposts of Aotearoa, our islands are populated not with people, but with birds. From the storm-lashed Subantarctic Islands in the deep south to the scattered volcanic islands of Tikapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf in the north, Birdlands offers a...
    Hardback
    $4199
    Elsewhere:
    $5000
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • On Sale
    21% off
    This Angry Pen of Mine
    This Angry Pen of Mine by Layne Staley invites you to dive into the untold creative world of Layne Staley, the legendary voice behind Alice in Chains. This extraordinary collection showcases his handwritten lyrics, deeply personal poetry, stunning original artwork, rare photos, fan tributes, and so much more. Step into the world of Layne Staley like never before. For the...
    Hardback
    $5800
    Elsewhere:
    $8999
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Beautiful Chaos
    New Release
    Beautiful Chaos
    Featuring five exclusive new poems, this stunning foil-embossed hardback edition is a collector's item and a gorgeous gift. The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller. Selected poems on motherhood from bestselling author and Instagram poet, Jessica Urlichs. 'Reading Jess's poems makes me feel like she's somehow reached into my own personal reflections and articulated them in a way I never could.' –...
    Hardback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $4000
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Split Enz
    New Release
    Split Enz
    'My favourite band. Ever! And certainly the best dressed.' Sam Neill Split Enz were never designed to fit. Emerging from art school mischief in early-1970s New Zealand, they turned pop into surreal theatre: costume, character and melody colliding in a rock band that refused to behave like one. At the centre of that vision was Noel Crombieβ€”percussionist, performer and the...
    Hardback
    $5199
    Elsewhere:
    $6500
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow
  • Mah Jong Player's Companion
    Since the arrival on the market of Patricia Thompson and Betty Maloney's two previous books, The Game of Mah Jong Illustrated and Improve Your Mah Jong, a wide range of hands from many parts of the world has been sent to them. In this player's companion, the authors have put together a cross-filled reference guide where over 120 hands, illustrated...
    Paperback
    $1999
    Elsewhere:
    $2299
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships tomorrow

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.